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Kiasma

Issue 23, Volume 7
Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helskinki, Finland, 2004
20 pp.
Publication address: http://
www.kiasma.fi

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University


mosher@svsu.edu

Kiasma is published by the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, part of the Finnish National Gallery. In 2004, it featured a variety of cinematic and artistic events, including an interactive installation by George Legrady making use of the contents of visitors' pockets. In this combination of calendar and magazine, we get a glimpse of the bidding war surrounding the Kiasma's acquisition of Markus Cooper's Archangel of the Seven Seas, a mechanical whale sculpture that vibrates and emits whale songs. We drop in on URB–
www.urb.fi–which is the fifth urban art festival involving youth in Eastern Helsinki as well as artists from France, the U.K., and Canada. The International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA) held their 2004 conference in Helsinki–with a boat trip to Talinn–as they did in 1994.

There is much to be learned about the art scene in Finland in this publication's 20 pages. There is a gallery of photographs of local artists from the early twentieth century to the present selected from an exhibit at the Kiasma museum to celebrate the 140-year history of the Artists' Association of Finland. Writer Erkki Pirtola quotes Joseph Beuys, "Every man is an artist!" (as an earlier German Dadaist wrote "Every man is his own football!") in the essay Who-what-artist?. In this overview of an art world where "everything is drowned in a deluge of the self," Pirtola discusses environmental artists Teuiri Haarla, Irma Optimisti, and Luri Luhta and conceptualists Harri Larjosto and Pekka Navalainen of the O Group.

The most curious Finnish phenomenon may be the genre of "steam art" sauna projects by the Renvall brothers: DJ Tiska, Kimmo Helisto, and Papu, the last of whom is pictured naked emerging with a friend into the chilly air to be doused with cold water. About untrained and Do-It-Yourself artists, "the self-made guardians of their own lives," Pirtola writes with hurried assurance that their "brave combination of kitsch and social radicalness does not, of course, diminish the value of gallery art."

 

 




Updated 1st December 2004


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